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Club clashes

In Coos Bay, law enforcement seeks to pull a bar’s liquor license

COOS BAY — Midnight has come and gone at Mak’s Old City Hall Lounge, which means the cavernous dance floor is finally coming to life.

The DJ has already cycled through a round of top-40 hits, from “Poker Face” to “Lollipop,” but that matters little to the growing crowd of locals trickling up two flights of stairs and then through the double doors adorned with fliers for “White Trash Wednesdays” and “Bikini Martini Fridays.” Most of them just got here, and many are already visibly intoxicated. It’s over the next two hours, and only on Friday and Saturday nights, that Mak’s will be transformed into the hottest dance club on the Oregon Coast.

It’s also during that block of time each weekend, and the wee hours that follow the club’s closing at 2:30 a.m., that this bar’s patrons have become a handful for Coos Bay police and the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. Patrons stagger out onto the street, wasted, urinating on the sidewalk, fighting, piling into cars and driving home drunk, according to police reports. The police are known to park nearby on Friday and Saturday, aware their services are more likely than not to be needed.

Between the opening of Mak’s in July 2007 to March of this year, police recorded 83 incidents of varying severity at the bar, which is more than all the other juke joints in town combined during the same period. The Coos Bay City Council voted unanimously earlier this year to recommend that the state revoke the bar’s liquor license, but that vote may prove more symbolic than anything else. The Oregon Liquor Control Commission had already notified Mak’s owners it intended to essentially shut the place down by cancelling the bar’s liquor license. In the coming weeks, an administrative law judge in Salem will make that decision.

The club refuses to quit, however. Its owners say they’re being singled out by the state and the police for catering to a primarily under-30 crowd, and for being the main dance venue in town. Mak’s attorney, James Monsebroten, has filed a tort claim against Liquor Control and said he’s researching the viability of a federal lawsuit. The state is trampling his clients’ constitutionally protected right to freedom of assembly, Monsebroten says.

It’s not just Monsebroten charging that the government has it out for dance clubs in Coos Bay. One after another, these establishments have been forced to shut down, say current and former owners of bars that offer a venue for people to get a little footloose. In 2007, it was Club 101, the nighttime face of a restaurant called Felipe’s, which racked up a similar list of grievances before the state canceled its liquor license. Before that, Gussie’s had to close, and before that, it was a different bar, all with varying official outcomes but the same effect: they’re no longer in business on the Southern Oregon coast.

“Bars that cater to a younger audience seem to get a lot more attention from OLCC and local law enforcement,” said John Pundt, a Coos Bay city councilor who closed down his Stray Katz bar and dance club, also known as Gussie’s, last December after “extreme” pressure from the state. “There are more issues there, but I don’t know that cutting off places for people to congregate is the answer, either.”

Long before the dance floor is packed, Amie Edwards was trailblazing on a recent Friday night, yanking young men off the sidelines and into the center of the club, barren though it otherwise was.

Now, after her 11th or 12th dance partner, Edwards is ready for a smoke break. She stumbles down the stairs to the concrete steps in front of Mak’s, which sits surrounded mostly by vacant storefronts downtown. Edwards says she’d be sad to see Mak’s go.

“This is my party town,” Edwards says. Any trouble at the bar isn’t Mak’s fault, she added. “I don’t even drink here. I drink enough to last me though the night before I come. I walk here; I walk home.”

Overhearing the conversation, an Iraq War veteran named Jonathan Bock chimes in.

“I fought and bled for every person’s right to decide for themselves” how much they can and can’t drink, Bock said. “There’s a bar two blocks away that serves much stronger drinks than here.”

Both sentiments are common refrains in the fight to keep Mak’s open, but they don’t fly, said Christie Scott, spokesman for the Liquor Control Commission. The problem with Mak’s is that people are either too drunk when they’re allowed in or they’re allowed to get too drunk there, likely because they’re being “over-served” too much alcohol. That leads to fights, drunken driving and myriad other problems outside, and the bar simply hasn’t done enough to curb the disturbances, Scott said.

The state’s “proposed notice of license cancellation,” drafted in March, reads like a police blotter worthy of the television show “Cops.” Not all resulted in arrests, according to the state’s compilation of police reports. Among the allegations from 2007:

On Aug. 10, a male patron pulled down the shirt of a female patron, exposing her breasts. Then a female patron punched another female patron in the head. On Sept. 9, an intoxicated male patron was hit on the head with a bottle, cutting his head open. Another patron received a broken tooth and two black eyes. On Oct. 13, a patron was hospitalized after four people assaulted him as he was leaving the bar, punching and kicking him until he fell down the stairs. On Nov. 17, two patrons in a self-described “drunken brawl” fought outside the bar. As one swung at the other, he hit a taxi windshield, breaking it.

On Jan. 20, 2008, a patron threatened the bar’s security guards with a kitchen knife and an ice pick. On Feb. 9, 2008, police broke up a fight on the dance floor involving 20 intoxicated people.

In January, after bouncers loaded a semi-conscious patron into a taxi, the driver called the police because the man had passed out by the time he got to the destination.

“You guys need to shut that place down,” the driver told the police, according to their report. “Everybody that comes out of there is messed up.”

Even one of the bar’s owners, Greg Rudolfs, mixed it up with a patron at Mak’s, in March of last year, according to police reports. While breaking up a fight, Rudolfs grabbed the throat of a patron and slammed him against the bar. He later pleaded no contest to a harassment charge.

The state tried to work with the bar to find a solution, Scott said, and the Mak’s owners took steps to make things better, installing 16 security cameras and sending six bouncers to training so they could be state certified. The guards wield Breathalyzers to check alcohol levels and they scan ID’s throughout the night. They use a clicker to monitor how many people are inside. There’s even an on-staff emergency medical technician on Friday and Saturday nights. But since a meeting in 2007 between Coos Bay police, Liquor Control and the club’s owners that led to an action plan to reduce problems, 56 more incidents occurred.

“You either have to stop over-serving, or you have to stop people coming in there intoxicated,” said Coos Bay police Capt. Cal Mitts. “I don’t know if it’s more people, more security, better-trained security. All I know is what we’re dealing with on the outside.”

The bar’s security guards have often been uncooperative with police, according to the state’s report, laughing and encouraging fights and withholding information from officers about injuries and fights.

Still, the bar’s owners say they’re doing everything they can, and they insist that most of the problems are minor and inflamed by the police, who have a grudge against them.

“There haven’t been any serious felony assaults,” Monsebroten said. “No one was stabbed there. There weren’t any major felony arrests or convictions. What they’re presenting is basically blotter notes on calls that come in. They can find a bunch of little-nothing situations if they’re sitting across the street trying to build a case.”

Some bar owners and their attorneys say it’s liquor control inspector Gary Francis, who covers the South Coast, who’s at the heart of the problem in Coos Bay.

Liquor Control is investigating Pundt’s allegation that Francis is telling potential buyers of the property Pundt owns that they won’t be able to get a liquor license there. Rene Majeski, the owner of an antique store in North Bend, said Francis had it out for her when she owned Felipe’s, a Mexican restaurant, and the dance venue it turned into at night, called Club 101.

“He did everything in his power to close me down,” Majeski said.

Majeski’s attorney, Adam Gould, said the state and the police used the bar’s efforts to be compliant against them.

“They said ‘You’ve got too many problems with fights; you need to call the police more often. That’s what they’re there for,’” Gould said. “They start calling the police more, and then they say ‘Look how many times you’re calling the police,’ and use that against them. OLCC should be there to help people stay in business. Instead they almost seem to prey on businesses, to find ways to shut them down.”

State records show a long list of problems at Felipe’s, mostly drunk people getting in fights. It’s not that the state is singling out dance clubs, testified Francis at a hearing on the license cancellation proposal about Mak’s. It’s that dance clubs are where the problems are.

“It’s not a pattern of closing down dance clubs. It’s a pattern of the problems are at the dance clubs,” Francis said in response to a question from Monsebroten during the hearing. “The public safety problems, the fights, the over-service, the harassment, the urinating in public — That all comes around the dance clubs.”

Francis went on, “We understand these are bars and not Sunday schools. There’s not a single bar out there that doesn’t over-serve their clients. But when the problem becomes persistent over a history, over a period of time, that’s an issue. With Mak’s, it’s almost every weekend.”